Google puts the anal in analytics

Google Instant is rolling out - where it starts serving up results as you type, to save you having to press a few more keys in. You can try it as http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy (yes, psy for psychic).

Start looking for analytics, however, and Google shows up its own pages once you get to "anal".

Google: anal

Oo er missus. Google does have some things in place to stop rude stuff appearing if you're searching for Cockfosters or something:

Q: If an offensive or lewd word is a fraction of my query, will Google push these results in front of me as I type?

A: As always, we provide options to filter the content you see in search. You can choose to set SafeSearch to filter out explicit content, and parents can lock SafeSearch to the strict setting. In addition, autocomplete excludes certain terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech.

Anyone find any examples where you can get rude stuff to appear? Funbags and jubblies are filtered out. How did they get on the list?!?! (Oh, I promised I'd link to David Waterhouse).

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5 Comments »

An interesting observation! Potentially a little concerning though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the first time I've seen Google actually manipulate the search results displayed and take freedom away from searchers, regardless of their personal settings.

Users have no control over whether these adult searches are shown, as even with safe search off Google still filter the results shown at their end, result in almost 'false' search results pages.

Makes you wonder what other searches they may be filtering prior to displaying results. A shape of things to come perhaps?

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